Integrating Content in Customer Workflow Applications

As I discussed in my last post, it is critical for information firms to distribute and deliver their content where their customers want to purchase, read, and use it. In addition to needing to support more platforms and mobile devices, publishers need to integrate their content in to their customer's workflow applications. Typical customers do not purchase data, reports, articles, or analyses for fun - they purchase these content pieces to help them accomplish their larger business objectives. This might mean checking the credit history of a loan applicant, scouring scientific literature for a grant application, or analyzing the legal precedents of an upcoming case. In each situation, the goal of the customer is not to get a document to display on her bookshelf, but to get access to the information in the course of performing a larger task.

Obviously, the key to make this easy is to not force the customer to leave their workflow tools and go to a discrete content website but to INTEGRATE the content in to the workflow tool. In many cases Information Providers are moving up the value chain and selling those workflow enabling tools - for example:

• LexisNexis Litigation Workflow Tools
• D&B Risk Management Tools
• Thomson Reuters Healthcare Clinical Evidence Solutions

In each case, the Information Provider adds value to the raw underlying content by providing a business process focused (or Knowledge Worker focused) workflow tool to help the knowledge worker turn the content from "information" in to "knowledge". Of course, this value-add is in addition to the direct content value-add through aggregation, classification, entity recognition & linking, and analytics applied in the Information Factory.

By building these Workflow solutions on top of standard REST or WebServices API's, the provider is able to leverage the existing content repositories, search, and enrichment capabilities without having to create duplicate product stacks. And, as I mentioned last time, the same content could be directly integrated with a customer's proprietary workflow tools or data. A well thought out and designed API enables many additional distribution channels and revenue generation options with a high ROI by enabling both provider built workflow tools and customer integration. And of course those same API's can support the new mobile applications that customers want.

There is also a very fast growing and productive middle ground for Information Providers to integrate with - Microsoft Sharepoint. This is one of the fastest growing products in Microsoft history, and used (admittedly to varying extents) by many, or even most, Corporate customers. The ability to provide pre-built Web Parts that customers can easily install in to their Sharepoint portal to integrate a provider's search and document retrieval capabilities are very powerful and provide a low-cost, very easy way to move beyond a generic internet content web site to a more integrated Enterprise application. Providing additional Sharepoint workflow enabled components can enable an information provider to provide the full range of on-premise, Enterprise capability without the cost and complexity of Enterprise application development and maintenance.